


Wolves Don't Do True Love's Kiss

by Capriciously_Terminal



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Blind!Ishimaru, Dream Sequence, Fables AU, M/M, Nightmare, The Wolf Among Us AU, Violence against dream snakes, Wolf!Mondo (The Big Bad One)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27637988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capriciously_Terminal/pseuds/Capriciously_Terminal
Summary: ~Inspired by a picture by andy-deer on Tumblr, be sure to check them out on Tumblr if you haven't yet!~Didn't you hear the story about how The Big Bad Wolf fell in love with someone else's prince?The course of true love never does run smooth, especially in Fabletown.A Fables/Wolf Among Us Ishimondo AU
Relationships: Ishimaru Kiyotaka/Oowada Mondo
Comments: 9
Kudos: 31





	Wolves Don't Do True Love's Kiss

Mondo Oowada had been having the same dream a lot lately, ever since that night he shoved the guy who used to be The Minotaur through the display case of a yarn shop.

Normally he and the other fables didn’t have such violent altercations now that his pack was gone, but then the detective called in a fucking favor from the big bad wolf himself.

And what else was he supposed to do? When the guy wouldn’t own up to the blood of all those teenagers in his teeth and he wanted to put his horns through the dancing princess turned detective and her naive sidekick?

If he’d known the whole thing was going to lead to a blind prince from another story storming up to his apartment from the DA’s office to yell at him about property damage and chances of exposure at two in the morning while he was trying to sleep off the few times he got gored, he wouldn’t have bothered.

It really wasn’t his fault The Minotaur couldn’t afford enough glamor to withstand a single punch. And he’d told the annoying little shit as much, but the whole thing inevitably meant that he was seeing a lot of Kiyotaka Ishimaru whenever he was roped into being the muscle behind Kirigiri’s investigations. Which was fine. And normal. But then the dreams started after that night at the bar, and everything changed.

* * *

_He doesn’t know when it changed, when he went from running in the forest of his mind on four feet to two as he slept._

_He never lost the sights or the smells of the old forest that had no name. But now he ran it as a man. No matter the wolf he would always be deep in his heart._

_It was something like when his brother died. He’d been too young, hadn’t even finished cutting his teeth, when he was shunted from the dreams of hurtling through the night at the front of the pack to hurtling alone through the end of days._

_There the isolation was a nightmare, a punishment, but this is not the same. This is a simple shifting of reality._

_Sometimes he wonders, looking at the webs of veins stretched under the skin on the backs of his hands in the gray light of morning, when the glamor started to feel more real than his body._

_When he grew so used to the delicate tapping of hands, to standing tall and far from the ground, that the memory of the nights spent slinking through the shadows on his belly faded. He would never truly know when that was lost._

_All that meant was that now, whenever he had to shift back, it was no longer the shrugging off of a costume like in the early days in this new town._

_It was shouldering back into an old coat, ill-fitting and smelling of pine, that stretched at the seams to hold him._

_He was freezing now, dreaming, skin unprotected from the winter that could steal the breath from your lungs. He was running towards the tower with a panting in his heart and a frenzied howl in his mind._

* * *

He mentioned it only once, over drinks.

Or, well, more specifically, only Mondo had the _real_ drinks. Something old and amber that burned as it went down. Something served in a glass of gently melting ice that was always refilled whenever he shot a slip of teeth to the bartender and flexed his bloody knuckles while eyeing the shelves of glassware behind him.

The bartender in another life, another place, not that it mattered much anymore, had been a pig. Mondo could tell not just from the swell of his pale throat and the slight tilt of his nose, but the fear that sprang in the air as soon as Mondo had entered that first night in town. The man froze like he was still the prey.

As soon as he’d entered the establishment for the first time, and seen the bartender shakily reach to stroke the brick wall for comfort, he knew the little pig remembered him. Mondo hadn’t paid for drinks in four years, and he hadn’t even needed to threaten to blow down the joint.

Not that he would do that anymore. Now, with cigarettes and cash in the pockets of his long coat, he would have had some complaints for the structure of the building and nothing more to add. Now, he could have figured out how to bring it down with his fist in moments instead of having to empty his lungs.

Getting Kiyotaka within the brickwork bar’s confines had been an accomplishment of its own, a sign of respect for their still growing friendship that made Mondo swell with pride and grin to himself at the sight of an old world prince crammed into a booth at his favorite dingy bar.

The first time he asked for drinks after a successful arrest, and had seen Kiyotaka nod against the neon backdrop of the city with an uncertain smile, he’d practically howled with glee. If he still had his tail it would have wagged.

But getting him to sip anything harder than soda water was a losing man’s game.

* * *

_The pines are so familiar he could think of them as his own brothers, feeding the deer whose innards he lived on before he found new villages to savage. Even as he left the skin of the wolf, he would never be free of this forest that still shuddered with his howls if he stopped to listen._

_But the tower, crooked and dark against the snowy sky, is new. Rising from the thorny ground as if it had been summoned from Hell itself._

_A break in the tree-line, a monument of dark stone frozen in a twisting shudder as it reached for the clouds. The single shining yellow window gleams like an eye watching him approach._

_If he saw eyes like than in an animal he’d think it was rotting from the inside out. He wouldn’t eat it, and instead leave it to bleed sluggishly into the soft earth._

_The tower is sick._

_A man is climbing it._

* * *

He’d been five drinks deep, warm in the belly and ready to curl up by the golden hearth that kept the bar warm, when it finally happened. He hadn’t actually curled up by a hearth in years, and would only consider it after five more drinks.

But needless to say, he was drowning in golden comfort when he’d asked about the tower. When he felt the air that had been so warm a moment ago freeze as the words left his mouth. A question that had been scratching at the backdoor of his mind since Kiyotaka had pounded on his door and demanded Mondo put on a proper glamor when he accidentally grabbed a hunk of his hair.

“It just doesn’t seem like you,” Mondo said. The words slurred, flowing between his teeth and tongue like a river. “A blind prince of all fuckin’ people. Breaking and entering.”

There was that twitch of an eyebrow, displeasure kept on a tight leash, that made Mondo’s heart clench with fondness.

It was a feeling like he swallowed the sun, his gut full of light, only for it try to kick its way back up out of his throat.

“I wasn’t always–I did not break anything! And I entered with permission.”

Kiyotaka had discovered the napkin dispenser on the table earlier in the night, sopping up a ring of condensation that Mondo had been happy to leave to sink into the table. He made use of it now, and quickly shredded a napkin between his pale fingers.

“Come off it, man.” Mondo chuckled, raised the glass to his lips, and took another swig. “What would permission to break into a tower in the middle of the fuckin’ woods even sound like?”

“I didn’t break into her tower.” Even blind, Kiyotaka knew how to glare with the best of them. Another napkin was plucked from the table, but he worried at it for a bit longer this time.

“She was screaming,” Kiyotaka said. “I was nearby, hunting, and at first I thought it was the wind. But then I really listened. And she was screaming.”

* * *

_The man is up higher than the treetops, clutching the stones of the tower with his bare hands. The wind is whispering, the clouds humming in anticipation._

_Mondo breaks into the space, and a name rings out like a bell in his throat. He howls with it, staring up at the figure as he runs. He is too far away to catch him should anything happen._

_When the man turns to look down, all Mondo can see is the red pinprick of his eyes burning against the grey eternity of the sky. And his hands._

_His fingers are bloody at the tips, streaks of crimson left on the stones. He broke his nails against the brick of the tower, flecks of scratched into his pale skin. He surely has been climbing for days and is nowhere closer to the top._

_Even as he runs, Mondo knows that though he has hands, he cannot climb fast enough to reach him._

_“Stop!” He hears himself roar. “You’ll fall.”_

_The man looks down, and Mondo feels his smile on the wind. He is weeping, tears freezing before they reach the ground to shatter into icy shards._

* * *

“What did you hunt?” Mondo was not sure where the words came from inside of him.

Kiyotaka’s sightless eyes were pale flecks of ice under his furrowed brow. He crumpled the napkin in his hands, and immediately tried to smooth it out with a regretful twist to his mouth.

“I don’t know for sure anymore…it was so long ago. But there was talk of a wolf, I think.”

He let the space hang between them, gave Mondo a chance to haul him up by his collar with a growl. But the rage never came. Mondo knew him now.

He continued on.

“I wasn’t much of a hunter. But I knew that my grandfather should have–,” his voice melted as it always did when the old king came into the conversation. “It is the royal family’s duty to protect their people.”

The freezing slush of the past seeped down Mondo’s spine. For a second he almost could see his breath, as if the old forest had risen back up around him.

For a second he could almost imagine it. Them meeting there.

He could imagine himself standing on all fours heaving, staring into burning red eyes against a dark and ancient sky. A figure fit to stop his rampaging ways. Not a woodsman, crude and homely, but a prince.

Would he have used a bow? A sword? What would have come first? A slice through Mondo’s belly or Mondo’s teeth in his neck?

But those times were long gone, and the quiet murmur of bar patrons tethered the two of them in the present.

“She screamed, and I followed the sound…and I found the tower. I called up to her.”

Mondo could imagine that with ease. Kiyotaka thundering out of the forest like a madman, yelling up at a witch’s tower to try and ascertain if a screaming woman needed his help.

Kiyotaka trying to figure out the best way to help her as the sun went down and the temperature fell.

Kiyotaka shedding a finely embroidered coat to climb a random ass tower despite any good sense he might have been taught.

His princely fingers, tapered and gentle.

“I thought she had lowered a rope. I didn’t know until I held it in my hands that it was her hair. Sometimes I can still feel the slick weight it.”

His hands clenched, old scars scraped into the pads of his fingertips drawing across the table. 

* * *

_The man leans back, and with the gentle gasp of the wind, he falls._

_Mondo is sure his heart falls with him_

* * *

“She was so young. And so frightened, Mondo. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her face,” Kiyotaka said, stricken. “Her hair falling to the floor.”

Mondo was only aware of the thundering breaths he drew in and had to focus to release with care. The howling of the wind was still inside of him, screaming to be let out.

“I promised her I’d help her, find a way to get her out of that place. I had to. It was a single room and it was freezing. In the middle of winter! Imagine it, Mondo, a single stone room is all you know for eighteen years. I think I was the first man she’d ever seen. She stared at me like she couldn’t understand what I was. She held my hands and…and she wept.”

His hands were shaking bad. Mondo focused on his breath and felt claws scrape somewhere down deep with his bones, hiding under the skin of a man.

“I promised her I’d help her because that was my duty to my people. Because she deserved more than to be a witch’s prisoner. I promised her that I’d keep her safe. I just needed a ladder, something so she could climb down. I had to go back for one, and she didn’t want to let go of my hand. I had to pry her fingers off my wrist. She cried after me.” He admitted it like some shame, like something heavy on his chest that Mondo understood.

“It took a full day’s ride to return. I hadn’t realized how far I’d travelled. And as soon as I found a ladder long enough I turned and went straight back. I think I almost killed my horse, but I couldn’t stop to think.”

The words were falling out of him faster and faster. Mondo didn’t know how to stop him.

“When I got back, when I called up to her, there was no sound. She tossed nothing down for me. So I climbed on my own.” His fingertips twitched, a sardonic grin followed them and looked wrong on his face. “But I was too late. I wasn’t fast enough. She was not there to greet me upon my return. But the witch was.”

* * *

_The man is caught in thorns. His fine clothes in the style of their homeland torn and dirtied. He is bleeding from his crown and moaning, but he does not scream. His bones are broken, his skin is bloody, his eyes are screwed tightly shut._

_Mondo feels something terrible will happen once he opens them._

_The snakes are looming, dry static across the ground._

_Mondo flings himself into the thorns on instinct bred by his old skin and bellows at the pain of it._

* * *

Mondo suddenly reached out, on instinct bred by his old skin, and felt himself take Kiyotaka’s hand.

The prince of the old world was startled. Mondo heard the stutter of his heart. The gasp of his breath.

Mondo knew a want like a chasm, stretching and straining from his chest through his whole body. It drove him to hunt, to shatter, to shrink his pupils to slits, and to take all the world had with a guttural howl. This want shuddered through his body at the sight of Kiyotaka, golden in the light, parting his lips to speak.

_He wants–he wants–he wants–_

In a way he had not wanted since the old days.

* * *

_He rips into the throats and bellies of snake after snake. He tears scale and muscle with his teeth and flings the corpses away with his hands until the ground is littered with them._

_Only when they are all dead, when the root-like curve of their bodies are all he can see, does he turn back to the man. He whimpers and the tears leak from under his closed eyes. He is beautiful._

_Mondo takes his face in his hands, feels the sharp press of his cheekbone against the palm of his hand, and moves close enough to feel the warmth of his shuddering breath on his face. Holding him close, their foreheads almost touching._

_Mondo feels the venom drip from his lips now, venom from the throats of the snakes that would fall to the man’s eyes and have force him cry out while his body recoiled. Venom that would steal his sight and cast his eyes in icy nothingness._

_But it is all he can do to press even closer, feel the man’s heart beat in one with his own, and ghost his lips over the chilled ones._

_The man screams into the kiss, and Mondo howls with him._

He always wakes in a cold sweat, and the moon is full and staring down at him from the sky.

* * *

Kiyotaka had continued the story, Mondo had not listened, too entranced by the simple impossibility of holding Kiyotaka’s hand.

“I think she kept her there the whole time, Mondo. And I don’t know what I wanted to do but that woman…she told me I had failed to protect the girl and she–she grabbed me and…”

Mondo could hear Kiyotaka’s heart thundering in his chest. Sweat was pouring down his forehead, tears welling up the creases of his eyes. It was like he could feel Mondo looking at him even as he kept his eyes downcast.

“And I fell.” His voice was hardly a rasp, utterly hollow.

Again, Mondo moved on instinct. Pulling Kiyotaka to him felt like coming home, squeezing his arms around his back as tight as he dared felt like obeying a rule of the new world. Like casting a glamor.

“Hey man, it’s alright now,” Mondo murmured. Something warm blossomed through the want in his chest, and it coated his voice.

“Mondo.” Kiyotaka’s voice was strangled, his arms hovered above Mondo’s back, as if he were unsure how to put them down.

“None of that shit matters anymore, yeah? You’re here now. With me. And I wouldn’t let anything like that happen to you again, swear on my fuckin’ life.”

Kiyotaka took in a shaking breath that hitched in his chest.

“We’re out of the woods, Taka. You and me.”

Kiyotaka let out the slightest sob, equal parts relieved and haunted, and finally wrapped his arms around Mondo. He surrendered himself into the embrace, and Mondo felt everything inside of him shift as Kiyotaka Ishimaru took up residence within the beating of his heart.

And everything changed, simple as that.

**Author's Note:**

> Like I said you really should check out @andy-deer on Tumblr! I wrote this instead of my final paper but you know what I think it was worth it in the end. We'll see if I have any more feelings about this or if it'll stand alone. What do you think?


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